Impending, possible meat shortages

@James_Dean
I was just thinking we hadn't heard from you lately, so I looked up this thread to see if you have been around lately. I was hoping a few a$$'s hadn't discouraged you from posting.

I read a disturbing story in the paper the other day about a few major egg producers being charged with price fixing. I was certainly glad you name didn't come up in that story.

Sure hope things get back to normal in your industry sooner rather than later.
 
I haven't noticed a shortage here but I have noticed doubling of prices on ground beef. $6 for a pound of 73% ground beef. $26 for 5 pound tube of same.
 
Stores are back to normal by me. They even had the jumbo sized chicken breasts for $1.99/lb
 
Plenty of meat of all kinds at the Kingston, New York Sam's Club this morning, and the limit has been raised to three per item.

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Prices on the things I bought (steaks and beef ribs mainly) were within a standard deviation from average. They fluctuate daily anyway, so I don't know whether it reflects anything other than normal variation.

Rich
 
Tomorrow morning I'm picking up a whole mess of chicken that the local minor league baseball team has arranged with one of the local artisinal restaurant suppliers to unload. Boneless, skinless breasts for $1.20/lb. Fresh leg quarters for about 80 cents/lb.
 
flyingron said:
Tomorrow morning I'm picking up a whole mess of chicken that the local minor league baseball team has arranged with one of the local artisinal restaurant suppliers to unload. Boneless, skinless breasts for $1.20/lb. Fresh leg quarters for about 80 cents/lb.
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Picked them up this morning. Packaging was interesting which I should have realized since these are restaurant supplies. All 40 pounds were in one plastic bag. Margy and I just got done running the Foodsaver to package them all up, most of these leg quarters were huge (28 ounces or so). I forgot to ask the girl at the stadium if these were the front or rear legs.

The breasts are frozen in ten pound lumps. We'll defrost these one at a time and re-Foodsaver them. I now have 80 pounds of chicken, probably about the same amount of beef or a little more, and still maybe ten pounds of BBQ from last year. We still have some squash and stuff Margy put up last year. We've already harvested a lot of lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, radishes, and garlic. We've got tomatoes, cucumbers, squash (various), onions, more garlic, carrots, and probably other stuff I'm not remembering still in the garden. We're in our third year on the bit asparagus patch, so next spring we will probably have a mess of that as well.

We'd have even more in the garden if it wasn't for the blasted ground hog. One 12g round of birdshot took care of that problem.
 
Went to Costco this week. They had both beef and chicken. Ground beef and expensive steak cuts.

Also, they have done away with all the behavior modification stuff and returned to regular opening hours. And just like that, without the panic, there is no more panic buying.
 
JOhnH said:
@James_Dean
I was just thinking we hadn't heard from you lately, so I looked up this thread to see if you have been around lately. I was hoping a few a$$'s hadn't discouraged you from posting.

I read a disturbing story in the paper the other day about a few major egg producers being charged with price fixing. I was certainly glad you name didn't come up in that story.

Sure hope things get back to normal in your industry sooner rather than later.
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No worries, it would take way more than that to make me leave. That indictment is about chicken meat, not eggs, and I think those guys have some problems. Mainly a story of execs changing jobs from one company to another, but keeping up conversations on pricing with old bosses to both company’s benefit. Another case of nobody wins but the attorneys.


Eggs have been involved in some price gouging suits lately, but without merit in my opinion.
 
James_Dean said:
No worries, it would take way more than that to make me leave. That indictment is about chicken meat, not eggs, and I think those guys have some problems. Mainly a story of execs changing jobs from one company to another, but keeping up conversations on pricing with old bosses to both company’s benefit. Another case of nobody wins but the attorneys.


Eggs have been involved in some price gouging suits lately, but without merit in my opinion.
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Unfortunately, in the new frontier, if you are operating at a profit, you're gouging.
 
SCCutler said:
Unfortunately, in the new frontier, if you are operating at a profit, you're gouging.
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That's the perception, but in a free society, the rule of supply and demand still rules. In fact, it rules in a dictatorship too, except the dictator and his cronies controls the supply.
 
ARFlyer said:
Not really. Still missing a lot of cut of meat and chicken products. I think people are still stockpiling as meats available in neighboring towns.
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That’s weird man. Been thinking about your reports and hoping your area straightens out.
 
ARFlyer said:
Not really. Still missing a lot of cut of meat and chicken products. I think people are still stockpiling as meats available in neighboring towns.
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Sorry to hear that.

We still have good supply in Atlanta, and it is getting better. The "glass case" in the meat section was empty for quite a while. As of two weeks ago it's fully stocked again. My wife just picked up skinless boneless chicken breasts for $1.99/lb. Not the $1.20/lb deal flyingiron got, but it was in small packs not large industrial quantities.

There's TP on the shelves again. It's not fully stocked, but not running out either. Flour is back on the shelves too. Again, not fully stocked, but not disappearing either and a wide variety of options.

Eggs are finally getting in better stock at Publix. Kroger seemed to have a better supply chain on eggs in our area. Prices are back down, not back to just before COVID, but down.

One oddity we had was running out of pastrami at the delis in the grocery stores near us. They had lots of other options, just not beef pastrami. o_O Looked like they were low on other items too, but I didn't check to see what else they were out of. It's back now and their shelves seem fuller overall as well.
 
We've had various rolling outages. Bread flour is still kind of spotty now and yeast isn't quite present in the variety that it should be stocked. The meat cases are pretty much back to normal and so are the eggs. In fact, Costco always had eggs all through this.

I had to laugh one day in that all the hamburger patty like substances were completely sold out, fresh, frozen, beef, turkey whatever. However, there was plenty of ground meat available. I guess the hoarders don't know how to make burgers that haven't already been formed into discs. Canned beans were gone for a long time though you could get fresh or dried beans no problem. The entire packaged bakery was stripped clean, but you could buy pretty decent bread at the service bakery.
 
l-53554-boneless-chicken-ranch.jpg
 
It's hard to get out of the habit of scavenge buying.
 
Local Costco over the weekend had most stuff. Department limits were almost all removed except on fresh chicken. Other limits were on specific items instead whole categories.
So yeah, supply is stabilizing.

Tim

Sent from my HD1907 using Tapatalk
 
Most meats at Costco last night, limited sandwich meat, and no ground beef, but enough selection. Much better. OTOH, baked goods are scarce, supposedly flour is the next shortage.
 
Matthew said:
I can get flour, but all the yeast is gone.
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They had it at Sam's Club when I went last week, but again, in industrial size. I think it was two 8-oz packages for about $5.00. A pound of yeast really isn't a problem, though, because yeast can be frozen.

Rich
 
I couldn't find yeast a couple weeks ago when the wife wanted it for some baking project, and a couple months ago finding baking powder was a big challenge.
 
Bill Jennings said:
Most meats at Costco last night, limited sandwich meat, and no ground beef, but enough selection. Much better. OTOH, baked goods are scarce, supposedly flour is the next shortage.
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Hmm, I went to the Alpharetta one on Sunday. They didn't have their regular $2.99 chicken breast, but they did have the organic ones, which is what we usually get. I didn't look real closely, but it looked like they had a good supply of other meat, and baked goods galore.
 
Just got back from the local Kroger.

Meat is back and staying stocked. However, I paid $6/lb for 80/20 Ground Beef. 93/7 was at $9/lb. The butcher thinks 80/20 will go up to $9/$10/lb in the next few weeks.

Pasta and chicken is still few and far between.
 
Publix here is usually back to normal. Somethings run out later in the day. We now have flour and yeast again. The toilet paper aisle looks normal.

But I still have a freezer full of chicken, beef, and pork that will last me a while. I figure if I need more pork, I can run down to Va, my local vietnamese pig butcher and get another pig (I didn't actually get to cook one this year because our Memorial Day BBQ got covided out).
 
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